Robot Primals
Exploring World Beliefs as a Source for Robot Behavior Design
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22190648 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dakota Sullivan (0000-0002-4901-6375, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Nathan Thomas White (0009-0000-9414-9647, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Yaxin Hu (0000-0003-4462-0140, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Jeremy D W Clifton (0000-0003-3185-3105, California University of Pennsylvania), Bilge Mutlu (0000-0002-9456-1495, University of Wisconsin–Madison) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2573-9522 • E-ISSN: 2573-9522 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1145/3749997 |
| OpenAlex | W4412700551 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 52 |
Roboticists are continually improving the quality of social robot behaviors and interactions with humans. This is a major goal of the field of social robotics, which seeks to create socially competent robots and improve their overall acceptance. Toward this effort, we propose the utilization of primal world beliefs (i.e., beliefs about the character of the world) to design behaviors that are relatable, intuitive, and based on an internal motivation. However, it is not yet clear whether humans can reliably discern these world beliefs in robots. In this work, we explore whether primals can serve as a novel framework to inform the design of robot personality and attempt to understand whether and how humans perceive primals within robots. Through two large online user studies ( \(n=300\) ; \(n=360\) ), we show that (1) participants are broadly able to discern intended primals in robots, (2) certain participant and robot primals predict participant perception of the robots, and (3) similarity between human and robot primals predicts improved perception of robots
Human–computer interaction · Robot · AI in Service Interactions · Computer Science · Psychology · Reinforcement Learning in Robotics · Social Robot Interaction and HRI · Artificial Intelligence
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |